The present invention generally relates to apparatus and methods for fabricating active microfluidic features such as valves and pumps.
The automation and greater reproducibility of microfluidic techniques make them ideally suited to collecting the amount of single-cell data required in Systems Biology research. Advances in microscopy have made single cell analysis an important approach in both the study of cell signaling pathways and in content analysis used in drug development. Microfluidic techniques have further enhanced these approaches and there has been an enormous explosion of new assays and techniques developed to exploit the advantages of this approach. One of the bottlenecks in the growth of microfluidics has been the lack of availability and the expense of devices to implement these experiments.
Existing methods for fabrication of active microfluidic features require two layers. Typically, existing methods use “flow” and “control” layers that are independently fabricated, aligned and bonded.
As can be seen, there is a need for apparatus and methods for improving the availability of microfluidic features.